Discipline
Civil Engineer, Expert Witness, Naval Architect
Specialisms
Offshore Wind and Renewables, Hydrodynamic Loadings, Wave Simulations, Mooring Analysis, Stability, Reliability and Probabilistic Analysis, Model Testing and Calibration, Seabed Scour, Structural Analyses, Jack-ups, Jackets, Semi-Submersibles, Ships and Barges, Vessel Cranes, FPSOs
Location
UK
About
Dr Rajapillai (Ahilan) Ahilan is a technology and business leader with over three decades of industry experience, more than 25 years of which has been at board level, including senior leadership positions at Add Energy (Executive Chairman & CEO), LOC (CEO), DNV GL (EVP), GL Garrad Hassan (President) and Noble Denton (President, MD). As President of GL Garrad Hassan, he led the world’s largest technical consulting firm entirely focused on renewables – 1000 staff. His experience spans both Oil & Gas and Renewables. As CETO, he has developed, and is now executing the Group’s strategy and priority areas for energy transition. He is also a member of the Bank of England’s Decision Maker Panel.
With expertise in hydrodynamics, he has led projects which have set standards and safety factors in jack-up site assessment, mooring systems and marine transportation. He helped develop the marine operations guidelines at industry-leading firm, Noble Denton. He is involved in many UK EPSRC funded research projects – (a) steering the DigiTwin project, (b) chairing the wave energy hydrodynamics project, (c) advises wave energy devices mooring systems modelling project and (d) extreme wave loading on wind energy fixed substructures. He has been an expert witness and technical advisor to lawyers in Norway, UAE and the UK on many technically complex cases related to marine operations, drilling rigs and FPSOs. He is Chairman of the charity Marine Technology Trust which supports industrial placements in the marine industry for UK university students. In addition to this, he is an Advisory Board Member of WavEC Offshore Renewables (Portugal) and was Non-Executive Director of a vertical axis wind turbine company.
He holds a BSc (Leeds) and MS (Caltech) in Civil Engineering, a PhD (Cantab) in Engineering Fluid Mechanics, an MBA (Imperial) and is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng).